Deal leaves liberals disheartened

The $38.5 billion deal brokered between Republicans and President Barack Obama on Friday night may have resolved the immediate threat of a government shutdown. But it didn’t take long for many liberal Democrats to begin to realize that there might be not much cause for celebration in the substance of that deal.

In the final hours before the federal government was to run out of money April 8, Democrats homed in on attempts by Republicans to pass anti-abortion policy riders that would defund women’s health programs and Planned Parenthood. But soon after the deal was struck, Democrats turned back to a debate not about where to cut, but whether there should be cuts at all - and who should bear the brunt of the burden.

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Princeton University professor Paul Krugman noted that by agreeing to this level of budget cuts, Obama had accepted the premise that the economy has recovered enough to withstand the withdrawal of federal spending. Despite the fragile economic recovery, the economy is still not strong enough, Krugman argued.

“It’s worth noting that this follows just a few months after another big concession, in which he gave in to Republican demands for tax cuts,” Krugman said in his New York Times column on Saturday. “The net effect of these two sets of concessions is, of course, a substantial increase in the deficit.”

But it seemed that the Obama administration had long ago abandoned that line of argument.

In the early stages of negotiations with Republicans, Obama surrendered the $40 billion in spending increases that he had originally requested in his 2011 budget and began to look for billions more to bring spending cuts closer to the nearly $100 billion level House Republicans had demanded.

And as far back as last November, Obama, declaring the message of the midterm election learned, made it clear that getting the economy growing and the budget deficit under control would be his top priorities. And, in his view, that meant spending cuts.

“I think the overwhelming message that I hear from the voters is that we want everybody to act responsibly in Washington,” Obama said in a press conference the day after Democrats lost control of the House and also lost six seats in the Senate. “We want you to work harder to arrive at consensus. We want you to focus completely on jobs and the economy and growing it, so that we’re ensuring a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”

What followed was a budget compromise deal that irked Democrats for many of the same reasons this most recent compromise with Republicans has muted the joy about an averted shutdown among progressive members in the House.

The tax deal gave Republicans much of what they demanded — an extension of tax cuts for the wealthy — in exchange for the extension of unemployment benefits for the poor. And this most recent budget deal gives Republicans more in spending cuts than House Speaker John Boehner had asked for. In exchange, funding for Planned Parenthood and women’s health issues were spared.

At least some Democrats now say that those cuts were too deep, and will disproportionately affect the poor.

“The American people have been told the agreement contains both ‘historic’ and ‘painful’ cuts. The question will be painful for whom,” said Rep. George Miller in a statement in shortly after the California Democrat and other Democrats voted against the first of two pieces of legislation that would allow the government to stay open for rest of the fiscal year.

“Poor and middle-class families have already received more than their fair share of pain in this economy, while the wealthy and special interests have paid no price.”

And Republicans managed to preserve controversial policy riders targeting abortion funding in the District of Columbia, to the anger of local officials. Washington Mayor Vincent Gray released a scathing statement on Saturday morning calling the deal “ludicrous” and declaring that once again, the people of nation’s capital had been “been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton, who occupies Washington’s at-large congressional seat but does not have a vote in the House, called the administration and Senate Democrats hypocritical for not defending access to women’s health services in the District with the same vigor with which they defended Planned Parenthood’s funding at the national level.